Читать книгу All That Swagger - Miles Franklin - Страница 6

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It was a wide morning in the New Year, with the summer braver than ever it is where the Shannon flows, when Delacy started farther out with fifty head of mixed horned cattle and a dozen horses. With him was the dour Dunn, a carpenter of sorts, who could build a hut. They had four horses loaded with provisions and gear, and the old musket and ammunition, with which to supplement their larder.

"Come with me, Johanna, up to the top. You can wish me luck."

From the clay of her advent, Maeve could be trusted to keep her foster sisters from harm, so Johanna walked beside Danny, who led the mare with the elder child astride her, to the crest of the ascent.

"Ah, me brave Johanna, look at that!" he exclaimed, his eyes enlarging and darkening with emotion. "With that before me I could lepp over the moon."

"It was the owld grey mare that was waiting till me back was turned to lepp into me lettuce plot," said Johanna, whose heart and body were heavy.

The cattle lowed questioningly at this disturbance of their habits. The dogs—brave heelers and intrepid kangaroo chasers—yelped and whined and rolled on their backs in impatience to be gone. Danny took the pipe from his mouth to kiss his family good-bye. This weapon did not look so big with a beard around it. His beard at twenty-five was sleek and fine, and had the goatee contour of the whiskers of the great Earl of Cork, to whose portrait, by Paul Van Somers, Danny bore a resemblance.

"If you get lonesome, shut the house and away to Mrs Wade. You and the children are more important than all the country."

He mounted and took off his hat and looked back, while the mare pranced and spluttered to overtake her company.

"The woild blacks up there maybe will eat ye," called Johanna.

"Why put such a calumny on quiet people," he laughed, and rode into the boundless day with the ancient enchantment upon it.

Johanna took her child's hand and watched the path against snakes. Their despatch with a stringy-bark sucker with a knob remained an ordeal to her. Maeve was her mainstay in this. The flicker to be seen in the dark people's eyes lit in hers at the sport, and she had to be trained to forgo such rich food.

Danny travelled with a paean in his heart, his eyes towards the ramparts that swept southwards to Brisbane Plains—the Monaro of to-day. The dazzling clarified atmosphere imposed no border on distance but eternity, and had a liberating effect. Nearer lay Limestone Plains, where to-day is the parliamentary city, conceived and planned in a spate of democratic idealism.

The tourist, succeeding the traveller, who early followed the explorer, may look across that view to-day, and see, still undefaced by man, the haunting beauty of the ranges wearing the ages down tenaciously. He can choose for himself where across them was the way of Daniel Brian Robert M. Delacy. Delacy's Gap and Delacy's Peaks sentinel the distance, though the old name is wearing faint with the passing of living memory, and new names are being substituted in compliment to petty officials. Where Danny raised his first hut may be known by the abrupt gorge, like the cleft keep of an ancient fortress, through which the river winds. The spot was familiar to the blacks as Burrabinga, or the jump, where a giant once leaped across with thunder and lightning in his spears. The homestead, an agglomeration of the years and the generations of Delacy, was for long one of the best known in the southern district.

A stockman going towards Ginninginninderra crossed Danny's track at noon with the news that the tribes of Monaro anti those from lower down the Murrumbidgee had been mustering for a week. They had arrived lean and mangy from Riverina, but several weeks' feasting, topped off with boogongs, had put a gloss on their hides and filled them with virility, which in all tongues is synonymous with fight. A battle was expected.

"Be the poipers, 'twill be an exhilarating spectacle," exclaimed Delacy.

The cattle, who could sense the approach of aborigines two or three days distant, had to be driven in a northerly direction from the smoke signals. Two days pressed travelling brought them to Keebah, where there was a good crossing. Delacy was welcomed by Urquhart and his wife, two young settlers with three infants. Urquhart was Danny's age, and his wife five years younger.

The house was the farthest-out convict-built house in its direction. The third generation of Urquharts used to exhibit the staples in the cellar—to which delinquents had been chained—as the patent of their own gentility, until the Federal authorities shore their outer runs from the home paddocks like the belly from a fleece lest the inhabitants should pollute the watershed of the new city, and thus dislodged a number of early settlers and endowed them with bitter views on Government resumption of land.

At the end of a pleasant visit, Delacy pushed on for another twenty miles, where the horses and cattle drew together baulking on the edge of the precipices which guarded his valley.

"Sure, ye'r honour, 'tis impassable," said Dunn.

"Impassable, by damn!" shouted Danny. "I have the intintion of breeding horses that could manipulate a steeple. This mare can be the pioneer. I'll go first. Rouse them up to follow."

With an "arrah" or two, the long-suffering brood mare was urged forward, and nervously sought the safest place to set her hooves, where later her progeny romped with the assurance of goats. The man on her back forced his flesh to the dictates of his mind, and horseflesh had to conform. Down she went, snorting, sliding, sitting, scraping the hide off her hocks, and with Dunn compelling the packed animals pinch by pinch in her wake. The dogs heeled the cattle and horses between Dunn and their leader and they came to the foot of the descent without loss.

The cattle settled for the night. Snow was falling in defiance of the calendar and had purged the air of the disturbing aborigines. The men made fires for warmth and to scare the dingoes. The dogs drew attention to an object which Danny found to be a native boy of ten or twelve years in the ashes of a dead fire. He was in a pitiable condition: the front of his torso was deeply burned: he made no movement.

Delacy carried the suffering creature to his camp and wrapped him in his own blanket. The charred body was softened with grease, protected from the weather, and had a few drops of rum forced down its throat. Later Danny tried to feed his patient on a morsel of bandicoot, taken from the dogs and roasted, but he could not swallow.

Next day Danny anti Dunn had to carry the boy in a blanket. He lay motionless and on the brink of death during the difficult transit. The dogs worked among the stock and at dusk the men rigged a canvas shelter.

"Sure, 'twould be aisier for ye'rself and him, ye'r honour, if you finished him now," said Dunn. "I've seen them shoot down manny a fine buck on the north coast whin I was serving rue turrn. They do be saying that they're not human, but only animals."

"What haythen promulgated that idea? Am I a murderer to choose between the colour of a skin? I show aquil respect to humanity whether it is black, white or yellow, bond or free."

He wrapped his invalid against frost-bite, while Dunn rode around the cattle and returned to report that a couple of blacks were spearing a heifer.

"And you to be letting them," yelled Danny, seizing Dunn's nag.

Later it was well-known from the Yackandandah to Yass that Daniel Delacy had no fear of anything—a surer protection than the old musket.

He galloped up to the aggressors—if that were the right term—dismounted and made signs of friendliness in the manner of Governor Davey's proclamation, and he bellowed—simply bellowed. It was said that in middle life he could sit on his verandas and converse with stockmen miles out on the run, so powerful his lungs, so resonant his voice, produced in the deep-chested Irish way, which is rarely muted by self-consciousness. He tried to convey that he gave the speared beast, but that the warriors were to touch no others. The fervour of his utterance, his blue eyes glinting conspicuously in the tan, impressed them. They made signs of peace. Danny rode around his cattle all night, but there were no further depredations.

On the day following, other blacks appeared, among them some who had feasted on the lumpy-jawed beast at Bewuck. Danny gathered from the pantomime that the story of the fosterage of Maeve was being told. They traced the burned boy to Danny's camp—possibly coming to bury him—and were impressed by seeing him alive and cherished. Danny had established himself as a superman, a big pfella chief, a popular corroboree theme. He had not embroiled himself by defence.

The boy's name was Doogoolook. He was left with Danny, and as soon as the beast was devoured, the tribe moved towards the black rock of prehistoric ages which still guards their borah rings.

Danny was safe to "tail" his cattle so that they would home in the valleys. He and Dunn made a hut of logs with a lean-to called a "skilling" and a roof of stringy-bark.

"A prodigious country, Dunn, to provide a roof for the skinning of it from the trees. A fine thing too to be killing a few trees in the process."

For weeks, the eyes alone showed that Danny's patient lived. Danny did not flag in greasing him, and fed him on skilligalee procured from the blood of wild animals. He talked to him in loud and cheerful tones, but no response came from the emaciated half-cooked frame. A bitch, brought to supply successors to casualties from snake-bite or kangaroo maulings, kept the sores as clean as anything science could devise, and one day when Danny was eating his own meal of duck, his charge reached for a discarded bone.

"Be the poipers! We shall have ye as strong as the Bull of Cooley or the cervus giganticus before long."

Dunn was unable to endure the stench of the fat on the creature in the blanket, but Danny's ardour for results rendered him superior to bad smells. He contributed a shirt as bandages for the sores, and a pair of trousers cut off at the knees. The remnants of moleskin made a comforting breastplate. The boy began to walk. His limbs were sound.

"Why does he never make a sound?" Danny would demand. "Maybe he's dumb, ye'r honour."

Danny thereupon yelled behind the child but he gave no sign of hearing. "There's deaf and dumb whites, and sure, this is a black wan. Doesn't that show that he is human and aquil with us? How shall we teach him anything at all?" After pondering Danny decided, "I'll have to keep him as a pet. He'll be an astonishment to me wife."

The cattle settled in the valleys contiguous to the hut. Danny warred against the trees with ring-barking—the new aid to destruction—added to fire. The weeks disappeared like quicksilver. Only two callers penetrated to the fastnesses—a man who helped to hump provisions from Keebah, and an adventurer from Limestone Plains. Danny had had but one chance of sending a message to Johanna. The heavy frosts of May brought him to a sense of the calendar. One day he brought the mare back on her haunches with a Nell. "Be the poipers, the youngster must have arrived, and me not to have remembered!"

He could not be sure to a few weeks in the months, nor a day or so in the week, where he was. He returned to the hut as if pursued. "Give me a bit to eat. I'm off to Bewuck. There's important business I should have been there a month past for. You give an eye to the stock," he ordered Dunn. "If you want rations, you can make out to Keebah."

Doogoolook ran after his master like a dog, so he had to stop and catch a second horse and furnish it with an improvised bridle and a piece of bag for a saddle, with greenhide loops for stirrups.

"Maybe I'll be back within a week, arid maybe not till ve see me," Delacy shouted, his horses on the run.

His intention of riding night and day had to be abandoned because of Doogoolook, whose body was not all healed. They reached Bewuck three days later, the dogs announcing their arrival. Johanna took her second child, little Della, and sat on the verandah facing the river.

Hannon came forward for the horses through a gate painted green, and Doogoolook, at a sign, went with him. Kathleen Moyna was so shy that she ran from her father and clung to the leg of Hannon, the ex-lag. Danny went inside with fear in his heart because Johanna had not come to meet him.

"Good day, is me wife well?" he asked of the strange woman who met him at the threshold.

"Quite well, sir."

"Johanna, me brave Johanna, where are you?" he called. He ought in every room for her. "Johanna, I've come home." She urned her head away and looked so thin and frail that he was artled. "The child that was coming," he murmured.

Her eyes flashed scornfully. "Ye might well ask! Ye to stay away all that toime without wan flick of proper affection as husband or her!" Danny was smitten mute, shamed that he had forgotten his impending fatherhood.

"The foinest boy ye ever saw, and him to be born dead by all I underwint. Lonesomeness and fright! The trees everlastingly moaning like banshees, and the bunyip screaming like wan murdered, night after night. Sure, Maeve and Hannon both tracked him as plain as bull beef on the flat rocks around the hole."

Danny did not scoff at the bunyip. "I'm sorry, Johanna. Sure, are things that can't be explained."

"There are plinty of them with ye, Daniel Delacy."

"I'm glad you have a woman with you, Johanna."

"Was I to be alone here with Hannon, a scandal for all the world and Walter Moore another? I wrote to Mr Moore and he took pity on me and sent the woman."

"Sure, Hannon is a quiet, harmless man."

"You need to be more rational."

"So a boy, and it dead," repeated Danny, subdued. "I'll need o recast me operations."

"Ye'll need to mind ye'r ways. I can stand no more. It's nothing but a snake killer in a territorial prison ye've reduced me to."

He dared not caress her. He retreated for the present.

He noted the rough chairs made elegant with paint, and was touched by the efforts towards refinement. Everything seemed prosperous and ship-shape, so really and comfortably a home to be proud of, that he was convicted of dereliction as a husband.

He made friends with Maeve and Kathleen Moyna. "Sure a brother for you, Maeve." Maeve smiled at Doogoolook and quickly discovered his disability. He clung to Danny, who returned to Johanna with him and the girls.

Johanna refused to look at him. "Ye can run after every black and Tom cat, and let ye'r own die forgotten," she said.

Danny had to go to the kitchen and eat with Doogoolook, and he persuaded him to sleep there until a "skilling" could be erected for him. Danny was cheered by the sight of his yearlings, the nucleus of the Delacy walers.

He had to dismount from the charger of adventure and propitiate Johanna, not without fear that he might lose Burrabinga. Having retired from the field of gallantry at eighteen, he was rusty in its graces, but he was urgent to revive Johanna's affection. He devoted himself to her throughout the winter, the more so because Walter Moore quartered himself at Bewuck for weeks. He was a lascivious fellow and had long been the bane of Johanna's life. Danny, who thought no evil, was at length convinced of Walter's wicked intentions. "Sure, 'tis a grief that he is the son of the best friend we ever can have. Otherwise I'd scald him with a kettle of hot water without anny compunction whatever. Come with me away to Burrabinga, Johanna, and you'll escape him and be with me to build up our fortune."

Such was the burden of his lay, until Johanna knew that further resistance would be useless, though her melancholy heart would not rise. In Danny's eyes was the light that had lit them in the far' days of Ennis, when, as a way to escape O'Gorman and have her love, she had consented to flee to New South Wales—a cataclysmic experience to one whose dream was an orthodox home with good carpets, china and napery. Hardship, suffering and loneliness had been her portion. Childbearing—four children and only two surviving—had weakened her for marital combat. In the intoxication of passion she had chosen Danny against her family, her country and her God, and could not now rebel. She had no one behind her. Marriage was inviolable in her world, divorce a scandalous phenomenon, a woman who deserted her husband a social outcast. Johanna had to cleave unto Danny now though the allure was no longer potent. The thrilling enfranchisement of her husband's early conjugal behaviour had degenerated to that sheepishness and self-consciousness irritating to a wife.